momagri, movement for a world agricultural organization, is a think tank chaired by Christian Pèes.It brings together, managers from the agricultural world and important people from external perspectives, such as health, development, strategy and defense. Its objective is to promote regulationof agricultural markets by creating new evaluation tools, such as economic models and indicators,and by drawing up proposals for an agricultural and international food policy.

Price scissors are worse for European dairy farmers

July 13, 2015

Not a week goes by without Brussels and governments being confronted with information on the plight of European dairy farmers. In France, the National Federation of Milk Producers (FNPL) recently suggested nothing less than “getting rid of livestock”, calling for Brussels to recognize “the crisis” and adopt “effective and reactive market management measures”.

While the world is experiencing a period of overproduction and price strains, the European dairy industry is blindly proceeding in a disorganized manner. Its producers are experiencing a growing scissor effect. Milk prices currently paid in the Netherlands, for example, are around 25-28 cents per kilo. According to the European Milk Board (EMB), the differential between the cost of producing milk and the price paid to dairy farmers in the Netherlands was 8% in 2014.

In France, imports are soaring in an already strained context across the dairy sector. “Liquid milk imports rose to 63% on the French market between March and April 2015 compared to the same period in 2014” according to the Syndilait union. The reason for this is that producer prices remained higher than 14 euros per tonne in France than in Germany or Belgium until the beginning of 2015.

The answer to dealing with this worrying situation comes not from the European Commission, but could come from the European Parliament. At the Agricultural Commission’s plenary session on 7th July, the European Parliament stated that “the EU must do more to introduce better tools to address market disruption and help farmers get a fair return on the food supply chain and find new markets for products excluded from the Russian market”. Although significant efforts are still to be made and all the more so that these are non-legislative resolutions, this vote at least opens the way to the European Union being held accountable, faced with a crisis that it must now name and assume.